Taomeow

What is denied is tangible daily 24/7 human membership in this theorized "oneness." People are born to be people, not emptiness, and are better off behaving like who they are (that's the real meaning of ziran, 'spontaneously natural') in taoism's cognitive paradigm -- in order to be fully human (ren), in order to have integrity (de), not in order to score points for some "empty state" of this or that philosophy. I'm talking about buddhism being interested in things taoism is not interested in, and vice versa. E.g., "desire is the cause of suffering" is a view taoism never had. The cause of suffering in taoism is lack of spontaneous naturalness, lack of integrity, also known as "fragmentation of consciousness." So taosim is concerned with unifying the fragmented, un-whole body, mind, and spirit into a coherent conscious whole. A lot of it is concerned with this and only this, in this-here life, and might take it from there towards any subsequent ones (in which not all taoist sects believe to begin with) only after the main task is accomplished. As for "dualistic" vision, what can be more dualistic than the mind-body split? And where in Buddhism is it NOT perpetuated? You are supposed to "discard" the body -- nice, where's the universal dumpster for things that don't matter, like living, feeling bodies of live, feeling people, and how does it make it non-dualistic to have such a dumpster distinct and separate from the purported unity of "the rest of it?" But in any event, why don't you share the poem?

Yeah, all one needs to do is pretend six thousand years of Chinese cultural history never happened, and then of course there's no such thing. Poor Fu Xi and the clueless King Wen and the hapless Duke of Zhow would never have bothered putting together a useless 'ism' if only they could be as lucky as we are and have access to mister Tolle's celestial revelations.

But that's in Buddhism. In taoism, there IS a self. "Qi blowing on ten thousand things so each can be itself " (Zhuangzi). Not "so each can be nothing," not "so each can be everything," but "so each can be exactly what it is instead of trying hard to be what it isn't." A "real human" of taoism is a self, a unique personality, not the kind made on some cosmic assembly line of pointless illusions but the kind shaped into a unique being like no other being in the universe, by qi blowing just on him, just on her,just so, just like that, the way it doesn't on anyone or anything else. That's the individual of taoist classics, not some amorphous refugee from personal to universal (because personal fails to satisfy, being what one is fails to satisfy, applications are sent to the universal buddhist-zen-hindu INS for citizenship in some no-self universality... and, as a matter of routine, denied on a case by case basis, have you noticed?..) The self of taoist psychophysiology is comprized of levels of consciousness that are present all at once but are invisible from a fragmented (not whole) perspective of each of its parts severed from its other parts, and taoist cultivation is about restoring links between parts of the fragmented self and, at a higher level, between the re-united self and tao. However, a self re-united with tao is not "nonexistent," it is still "itself," only harmoniously aligned with the rest of reality instead of clogging same with its broken bits and pieces.

El Tortugo, I don't know what "they" say but I say it's right on. Consciousness is only a mystery to those who "study" someone else's consciousness. To those whose mantra is "know thyself," it's as clear as a shot of Smirnoff's. "Mystery" is just another word for "poor memory." And memory is poor when the bulk of its developmental history is repressed. And it is repressed only when it is traumatic. And this is why dabblers and "professionals" in "someone else's consciousness" alike don't go there. For if they were to go there, they'd find out why they don't remember, and then they would remember, and then they would shit in their diapers... um, pants. Take the lower brain and the midbrain, e.g., the ones that were there when your neocortex wasn't fully developed yet. Meaning during gestation, birth, infancy, and the first five years of your life. Your neocortex is a late afterthought, both in evolution and in personal development. Everything has already happened, you are complete as a feeling, conscious being long, long before your neocortex comes into the picture. Ah but the moment it comes, it starts telling the rest of you what to feel and what to think, and the rest of you complies because the neocortex is the boss in a crisis, and your life IS a crisis since before birth, civilization has made it so. In a crisis, the boss tells you, "forget everything you've experienced so far, forget how it made you feel, forget all you know, now I'm going to be telling you what to know and what to forget, what to feel and how to intellectualize it away, and what not to feel under any circumstances, numb out forever -- or else we go crazy, how's that for a plan for the rest of your life?" And you shit in your pants and comply. That's how modern consciousness works. No mysteries...

After I mastered the techniques, I abandoned the practice but retained the skill (like my other example of having learned to ride a bicycle -- once it's done, it's part of me, I have it "always"). So now if I happen to get a lucid dream, I get it spontaneously, and it is never useless, it invariably serves a purpose of affecting something in my waking life. Examples: I invented a couple of nifty devices in a lucid dream, when I woke up all I had to do was put them together. I internally resolved my relationship with my father, a lifelong issue, in a lucid dream; when I woke up, it was "done," and remained resolved. Most importantly, my taoist magic teacher visits me this way... I met her in real life long ago, since then she paid a few (rare) dream visits when I needed her, and always helped tremendously. Lucid dreams are not the ones that "feel real," they are the ones that ARE real, in that they tangibly affect one's waking life. If they don't, they aren't. One of the authors who wrote on the subject asserts that when he was a kid he used to find a dollar in his waking jeans after dreaming he had one. It happened to him every time he wanted some innocent childhood pleasure real bad and his stingy parents wouldn't give him any money. I'm still looking for that majestic pearl I found in a lucid dream and then lost in same...

I've first come across this idea in the writings of a taoist philosopher whose name eludes me at the moment, unfortunately, and found it pretty striking. His main argument: "the present" doesn't exist, "now" doesn't exist, it's the ultimate man-made illusion of them all. His reasoning: you can never have a "now" because it immediately turns into "back then," it always reverts to what's behind you, split it into milliseconds and still not one of these milliseconds can last enough to become a "now," it is a "back then" before you have a chance to grasp it... split the millisecond a million times and each part is still the same, not a "now" but a "back then." The static man-made idea of "now" has no counterpart in reality, it only exists in our imagination. The "present," unlike the past and the future, i.e. unlike where things have been and where they are headed, constitutes something that doesn't occur in reality -- a stop, a pause, an interruption in the flow. In reality, there's no such stops, no place in the flow of reality is a frozen "right now" place, they are all behind us or in front of us, but the very spot we occupy is taken -- not by a "now" but by a past-to-future transformation that never, ever pauses to create any stops in between. This is a dynamic picture of Hou Tian, tao-in-motion. The static picture, Xian Tian, tao-in-stillness, is devoid not only of the "now" but also of the "past" and "future," it exists outside time and any developments that are time-sensitive (like a cause-effect relationship, e.g.) are impossible in it, since nothing is its cause and everything, its effect, but they are freely interchangeable -- e.g., everything combined would yield tao-in-stillness and nothing at all, its ultimate manifestation.

I'm enjoying it too, Wayfarer... and thanks to all for thoughts and feelings shared! And, Michael, thanks for your "great truth!" Here's what I meant by sleep-walking. I was learning how to lucid-dream at one point and since I had no one to teach me this particular skill in person, I read all I could on the subject (that's how I usually read when a subject interests me -- total immersion for a while, then let all the red -- um, black -- dust settle for a while... and then what settles usually contains what I need... alas, it often means the names of authors and titles of books have completely dissolved! ) -- so, what I gleaned from the best-presenting sources was that the way to learn to lucid-dream with intent that will make it possible to affect the waking reality from inside the dream is to become very aware of one's physicality and reality in the waking state. This seems to be the prerequisite, THE door that can help one take one's tangible reality into one's dream and back without losing touch with it, instead of drifting aimlessly in a dream world you can't call your own because you don't maintain a home there, have no lasting relationships there, and can't deliberately make things happen "here" by acting "there." So... there was this French guy who researched and then practiced and then taught lucid dreaming for a long time, and he suggested the following practice. Every time you pass through a door, any door -- another room, in or out the house, the bathroom, the classroom, the office, the supermarket, the car -- pause, touch the passage with your hand, feel your hand, feel the passage, feel your whole body -- and ask yourself a clear question: "AM I DREAMING?.." This helps one catch oneself "sleep-walking" through parts of his or her life... if not all of it... all the passages, changes, transformations... doors we don't notice... this is one technique, out of a few good ones, that teaches one to notice... and wake up. So then when you can, first and foremost, tell the difference between when you're dreaming and when you're awake, this makes you "more real" in BOTH states... for they are different realities and mustn't be de-differentiated unconscously. By the way, in one of Castaneda's books, he asserts that Don Juan taught him to remain conscious in his dreams by continuously looking at his hands with his mind's eye when going to sleep. Again this seems to be about taking one's physicality into the dream state in order to be able to consciously act there. (By the way, it is very difficult to do...) So, basically, I meant that I touch doors and catch myself before I drift outta my body without noticing. If I do want to enter a space-time where the whole of my physical body can't follow, I at least try to make as much of it follow as I possibly can (e.g., the vital signs I mentioned -- they will match where my mind is taking my body, and I will be aware of it. More often, though, it's vice versa, i.e. my body can take my mind elsewhere in space-time... the smell of burning moxa does it to me every time, e.g. ...and a whole bunch of other physical things.)

Well, I specifically avoid any and all practices that disconnect the mind from the body. I don't astral-project and don't sleep-walk and don't meditate without setting up a "be aware or bust" conditions for the body too (full lotus, e.g., not a comfy chair), and don't let my mind be in the book without knowing at all times where my body is and how it feels. That's why I'm not afraid to "intellectualize" -- unlike the in-the-head intellectuals who get permanently confined to a lifetime imprisonment in the left brain hemisphere, I have invested a bunch of time, effort, and systemic body-inclusive learning into connecting my body-mind-spirit into a unified whole. So when I "intellectualize," I do it with my whole body, and when I'm being physical to the max, I do it with my mind on what I'm doing. I was discussing something "intellectual" the other day and a friend told me, "If I was deaf I'd think you're Italian." Meaning I use my hands (and body language in general) when I talk, all the time. I can't intellectualize without my body participating... physically unable to disconnect my head from my hands and my belly from my neocortex...

Don't be hard on yourself, Nobody knows! Meditation-wise, I'm perhaps a bit different from most people I know in that I've been doing it for thirty years, and the nature and quality of the meditation experience "now" is radically different from what it was when I started. And it is different "now" because the past thirty years of doing it is what shapes what it's like in any which "now." If I just started today for the first time, my "now" would have been quite a bit deficient compared to the "now" informed by "all this time." The current me, the "now" person following her breath, can "rest her breath on her mind and rest her mind on her breath" simultaneously, as the immortal Sun Bu-er has instructed. Meaning, she can remember she's riding a bicycle and has bills to pay and still not lose track of her breath and her intent, not lose track of being present and aware. Moreover, she can remember she's eating an apple, breathing, clearly seeing an apple tree in full bloom in her lower dantien, tasting the apple of a private garden in a Ukrainian village of long ago that tastes vastly superior to the supermarket one she's eating right now, breathing, never losing track, tasting all the apples she's ever eaten, all at once, breathing in the smell of the apple tree in full bloom into her blood... and expanding it all any which way she likes into anything she feels like creating or receiving at the moment. Meditations and "awareness" of a person who doesn't lose track of the past become quite holographic with time. There's room for everything in there... you can strip it down to the bare bones, breathe in breathe out, but only through duration and continuity (tao's virtues, according to the Ta Chuan) the bare bone starts sprouting reality... Every breath I take every twenty-four hours has some molecules in it breathed in and out by Laozi once, it's about as long as it takes every molecule of air around Earth to travel across the globe and come back, and it never dissipated and never disappeared, it's never "in the present" without simultaneously being "in the past," which means you can call it anything time-wise but it "keeps happening" only because it "was" and "will be," over and over. "The pattern of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return," as the classics put it.

Lemme try an example. I can ride a bicycle. I learned how to when I was five years old. Any subsequent "now" of mine contains this skill simply because I "contain" it, and I contain it "now" only because I acquired it in the "past." I "always" can ride a bicycle "now" because I have a skill installed, and I installed it myself, let's say as part of my "software," and it is good for any "now" to come. Give me a bicycle and a-riding I go. I can see. I learned how to when I was a fetus. Any subsequent "now" of mine contains this skill. I "always" can see "now" because I have a perception installed, and I didn't install it myself, I got it pre-installed as part of my "hardware," and it is good for any "now" to come. Give me something to look at and I see it. I can read. I learned how to when I was three and a half years old. Part of software I installed myself in the past. Good for any "now" because it's part of me present in any "now,' for the only reason that it got shaped into part of "me" in the "past." I can breathe the Earth's mix of atmospheric gases and extract oxygen from it and use it to get my metabolism going and be what they call "alive." This ability to breathe oxygen successfully is part of hardware installed in the past, I didn't have to install it myself. Good for any "now." To summarize, I can see how what was done in the past, by tao, evolution, and me personally, continuously come together to make me what I am, although "am" can never stay put, I never "am," I'm a process, I'm a flow, I ain't, unlike John Lennon, no walrus, you can't pin me down with an "is," I "was" and "will be" but "is" just won't stay put, it flows and changes! I can also see how what I do with all of it every moment of my life and what tao and the tianzun (all taoist deities) and all human and non-human interactions and interventions combined are continuously shaping this past me into the future me, shaping the past-future me -- -- and all of it is one hundred percent real, and all of it is happening outside any and all "now" simply because "now" that has no past and no future is "never." I "never" breathe methane because the past hasn't equipped me to, I "never" speak Sumerian because the past hasn't equipped me to, I will "never" have a blood-related nephew in the future because my past has made me an only child, I will "never" be African-American in the future because my past has made me Russian, and so on. All the "nows" in the world that do not flow continuously and inevitably from all the real, developmentally accounted for "back thens" do not exist, aren't real, can't be, are a bunch of "nevers" and "make-believes." The only "now" that is possible is an illusory "snapshot" of what IS real, the "past," and the only future that is possible is the mirror into which this past is looking from a distance before getting right there and right through it like Alice in Wonderland, and neither the past nor the future need any "now" in order to exist and be real. Whereas a "now" is like a mirror looking into itself, a total impossibility... And... ...if, as so many say so often, it's all so simple, why did taoism produce the single largest body of written knowledge on the planet (hundreds of thousands of non-repetitive documents!) in order to elaborate on this simplicity, and countless hands-on (life-on) practices to master it?

"Like a rock in a stream" you feel? I feel like the stream. Where's the "now" of the stream?.. If it's in the rock, if the rock is the "now," then to a stream, the rock feels as an interruption, a distortion, an obstacle between where it's coming from and where it's headed. The stream doesn't merely feel the rock, it responds to it with everything it is -- explodes over it in a cascade of splashes and droplets, twirls, makes a noise... jumps, rolls, slides, hits, reacts, lives the encounter!.. but doesn't stop for it!!. I do feel like a stream with rocks in it. Incidentally, that's how my taiji teacher describes the flow of Chen style: like a river with rocks in it. (Yang is like a river flowing over a smooth sandy bed...) Nope, I'm cultivating myself to BE the time machine... *is serious*

I think the idea of "no now" points to the process... and in the process, rather than in "what we think about the process," the past is real... you were indeed born of your mother, whether you think anything about it or not, and you are likely to die one day, or alternatively become an immortal, so some kind of future is also "guaranteed." "Now" doesn't take the process into account. At its worst, it can become an amnesiac's way of justifying the gap where memory should have been, and an irresponsible freewilly's lack of interest in whether his kids will have a reason to cry at his funeral or, alternatively, to dance on his grave. Oddly enough, I have worked, more than on anything else in my life, on unifying it in time, on grasping it as a process, as an unfolding, integrating it into a continuity, and experiencing/feeling it this way. This gives me conscious, and rather comprehensive, access to most moments of any length whose combined continuity I call my life. So any "now" I live right now is not necessarily a chronological January 19th, 2007, 1:03 a.m, because I can as easily as most people can flip to a different TV channel flip myself to the "now" of April 30, 1976, 11:17 p.m., and be/live/unfold as everything that is me right there right then and experience it as now any number of times I choose to, complete with skin sensations, sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, thoughts, and even my very own precise blood pressure and heart rate and respiration rate and hormonal output of that particular "now," or if I choose to, the "now" of another time with the same all-inclusive precision. I have, or else know exactly how to gain if I need it, an almost infinite conscious access to any and all such moments throughout my this-here life (and a tiny bit from other ones too, but this is a separate subject). So there's no convincing me that "now" is only now, because experientially, emotionally and spiritually and physically, it is "whenever I choose it to be." "Now" can be a choice, a decision, not just a passive acceptance of what the illusory "timeline" has to offer... I believe an ability to consciously choose a "now" is neither a mystic ability nor a preprogrammed inability, it is simply a skill, just one of the skills most people today aren't taught, like modern dentists aren't taught the ancient Egyptian dentists' skill of implanting gold-laced animal teeth into their patients' jaws, and modern firefighters, their shamanic brothers' skill of summoning the rain...

Are you a native Chinese speaker? Dr. Lu is best known for his translation of the Yellow Emperor's Classic Of Internal Medicine. This, as well as seven of his other books, are recommended by the Board of Acupuncture Examiners in the US. His second language, English, is the one in which he got his Ph.D. from the University of Edmonton, Canada. He has no trouble explaining exactly what he means, though his terminology differs somewhat from that of some other good translators of Chinese classics and from that of all the countless bad ones. Have you read any of his books? Most native Chinese speakers fluent in English freely substitute "energy" for a concept too complex and alien for a Western mind to grasp (my guess is, most modern Chinese minds have trouble with jing-qi-shen too, contemporary education has made sure they do.) I, however, used a shortcut when I said "increase energy" that I've seen and heard used by numerous Chinese sources, but personally, I have no trouble thinking in nondualistic terms of the classic taoist cognitive paradigm, ten years of devoted practices down the road. Thick bland foods are jing-nourishing some of them, not all of them (e.g., glutinous rice is, but oatmeal isn't), but nowhere near to the extent ginseng is, and nowhere near to the extent deer antler is, and nowhere near to the extent a thick mushy soup WITH ginseng and deer antler is (my recipe was for such a soup, remember "bones" I mentioned? -- you cook gelatinous jing foods right outta a nice bone if you make the stock the right way, which means you cook it for a long time, protect the ginseng from heat in a separate container or use a double boiler, and so on). Trust me... I'm a pragmatist, I would never post a recipe for "energy" that doesn't mean both "jing-qi-shen" AND mitochondrial ATP, and both empirically AND theoretically. To disprove what I said, you would have to cook it, eat it, and then report on it doing nothing... which you wouldn't, I promise!

Herbs ARE part of diet and nutrition, especially for a practicing taoist. A couple of my taoist nutrition gurus, Dr. Stephen Chang and Dr. Henry Lu, refer to herbs as "forgotten foods." Dr. Chang asserts a diet that doesn't include them is deficient in energy, meaning deficient in qi and jing and, invariably, shen, meaning everything will be affected adversely, including, but not limited to, one's sexual experiences. (It's not a quantity issue, it is a quality issue...) Dr. Chang's example: Carrot has enough qi to last it a few months, whereupon it dies a qi-depleted death. Ginseng has enough qi to last it over a thousand years. Carrot, as well as all other plant foods "normally" eaten, as well as animals eating these foods, are never as strong and as strengthening as the best qi-rich plants and long-lived animals (e.g., turtles). Most if not all foods in a modern diet are "weak." Many herbs are "foods" too, "forgotten foods" and "strong foods" at that, not "weak foods..." ...and that's one reason our sissified, weakling-with-sweet-tooth-oriented culture has abolished them. We don't even eat bitter foods (the way all indigenous cultures do) which are, in and of themselves, a strong sexual enhancer just because the flavor, bitter, nourishes the heart, imparting feeling and "heart connection" to the otherwise heartlessly mechanical and therefore profoundly inferior (regardless of size and hardness) sexual experience. I think just about the only bitter food Americans partake of is coffee, but even that they sweeten with sugar and baby-food with milk. Yet I don't think I would want sex with anyone who doesn't at least drink coffee, because the heart of a weak-foodist is disconnected by "dietectomy," and heartless sex interests me not. Incidentally, heart connection is what the use of tongue in kissing is for -- at least in adults -- the heart meridian opens into the tongue. In overgrown infants, of course, the culturally predominant species of homo sapiens today, it's used because sex and unfulfilled infantile needs are thoroughly intermixed in their psyche and they use sex as a substitute for breastfeeding they either didn't get or didn't get enough of, or didn't get from a feeling-unimpaired mother.

Lend an ear to some herbal advice. The number one size-enhancing herb is Butea suprema from Thailand I'm told. The number-one sensations- and performance-enhancing combo (steady, not sporadic in its action) is a ginseng/deer antler soup (cooked with some meat and bones, ideally of game origin but lamb or beef will do too). Younger guys shouldn't take it in summer months, older guys shouldn't take it with high blood pressure. Here's a bunch of other herbs whose combination will accomplish some of it though none of these have a particularly noticeable (or even related) effect by themselves: Ashwagandha, Catuaba, Cnidium, Coleus forskohlii, Damiana, Horny goat weed , Maca, Passion flower, Mucuna pruriens, Muira puama, Suma, Rehmannia, Rhodiola, Shilajit (this one is not an herb, it's a complex organic substance of natural origin), Tribulus, and Tongkat Ali. Well, Yohimbe too I'm told, but this comes from a tradition I know little about. While we're on the subject: women ISO breast enlargement can try another Thailand herb, pueraria, and take copious amounts of fenugreek tea internally. And of course the Deer (not the Deer of qigong but the Deer of female internal alchemy) but not in excess of 64 repetitions.

I usually do either the Three Spheres (medium-low stance, legs "holding" the lower sphere, arms, the middle, hands, the upper) or the straight Pole. For the all-nighter, I did the Pole. No breaks. It was done under extreme stress (after the most horrible day of my life, and with a complex decision to make still pending.) It was a very extreme experience and it brought about very extreme results. Basically it rearranged my metabolism -- semi-permanently some of it, and some of it, permanently. E.g., it lowered my body temperature by over one degree F permanently. Slowed my heart rate by ten beats per minute, also permanently. The less tangible "events of the soul" are hard to describe... basically, it imparted a kind of long term sturdiness, a knowledge that I can't be broken and that whatever needs to be done, and whatever it would take, I can and will do it. And did...

Here's a hypothetical situation which I hope some of you might help me ponder. There's a woman who discovers meditation many years ago, spontaneously, the non-denominational kind. She discovers, of all things, the lower dantien, as a somatosensory truth, without ever having heard of one or having the first idea as to what word to use to describe it, and breathes through it for years. Then she reads the history of world religions, several tomes, and decides none of these fit the bill. Then she discovers taoism as a science, taoism as a practice, taoism as a cluster of ideas close to her heart, and feels she's come home. She starts learning and practicing. She reads the classics daily but eventually comes to mostly ignore modern writers on the subject, with the exception of perhaps such whales as Joseph Needham, and definitely has no use for popularizers and wash-downers and anything-goers. Most importantly, she has no use whatsoever, in terms of "things to learn," for any information dispensed by anyone who is not a practicing LINEAGE taoist himself or herself. Researchers, armchair philosophers, or inventors of practices that are five minutes rather than five thousand years old -- none of these float her boat. She starts learning Chinese in order to break her dependency on translators who mostly translate their own Western mind into everything they offer. She also has two teachers, live ones. One of them is a stellar martialist and another, an efficient sorceress, and she is very happy with both and humbled beyond repair by what a true teacher can offer. So far so good. Then the woman decides to participate in some online discussions of taoist subjects. And... And no matter where she goes, she is invariably, and relentlessly, besieged by teachers. She is being taught, and taught, and taught. At least eighty percent of people posting at such forums assume, on autopilot, that they are bigger-better, know more, are wiser, are spiritually more advanced, have a better clue, have greater accomplishments, are smarter, are humbler, are more at One with whatever they're at one with, are enlightened, are superior, super-superior, double-plus-superior. And they teach. And preach. And teach and preach and teach and preach and argue and dismiss and overrule and gallop on high horses and jump on soapboxes and hit her with their superior understanding, repeatedly, on the head. And... And she doesn't really know what to do about it. Just let them? Perhaps. She is not obssessively defensive, she can live with it, no problem. Let them. But then, what about reality? Does she have an obligation towards that? In reality, all of these teachers would benefit a helluva lot more from learning rather than teaching, and that's the truth. What should she do about the truth? Let it slide? Ignore it? Or abandon the idea of sharing ideas via the internet altogether? This superiority complex of people who have read a book, or two books, and meditated for twenty minutes here and there, and rush to the computer to start teaching... what, if anything, can, or should, be done about that? Huh?.. She is perplexed, and doesn't have a solution. Whoever has been in her shoes, please share your experience! (Teachers of a superior extraction, please don't bother, she already knows everything you ever have to say, every little thing... sigh.)

Ever tried it for eight hours straight? To me the "secret" of this practice lies in one of the "virtues of tao" (according to the Ta Chuan) that manifests if you go far beyond the everyday human comfort zone -- "endurance," "perseverance," "duration." "Tao dwells in things that endure." It is much more difficult for a human to "just stand" than it is for a tree. At least for me it gets difficult after a while. Only if I "persevere" far beyond the point where it gets difficult does it get really interesting.

One may not find this in any classic TCM books of course, but I think I can analyze its action in TCM's terms, it's a rather simple energy pattern to discern. Thermal nature: hot, dry Flavor: bitter, pungent Directions: ascending, yang, Fire Phase of Wuxing, Li of bagua, Li and Tian of the I Ching Organ affinity: Lungs, Heart, Triple Burner Action: dispels Dampness, moves Stagnation, tonifies Yang, replenishes Yang Deficiency Contraindicated in Dryness conditions, acute Hot conditions, Yin deficiency with False/surface Yang symptoms

A few years ago, when something horrible happened that I didn't know how to process, I stood in Zhan Zhuang all night just because I couldn't think of anything else to do. In the morning, I had the solution -- and the center within, something unbreakable that felt like a diamond axis. It gave me the kind of strength I needed at the time, and never knew I had.

Well, from my studies of Native American shamanic cultures (i.e. all of them before the white conquest, and the precious few still surviving in South America), it transpires that across the Americas it was the only sacred plant that was sacred to ALL of them, much as the rest of their traditions (invariably centered around a bunch of sacred plants) were widely different. Ayahuaska was the close second in South America, but tobacco has always been the number one for all of them without a single exception. Typically, children were introduced to smoking it in a rite of passage at age eight. Lung cancer was nonexistent. Medicinal preparations of the plant, in addition to smokables (which were sometimes up to three feet long) included decoctions, extracts, ointments, salves, and teas. The salves cured skin cancer, the ointments healed wounds, the decoctions were used for communicating with spirits, and so on. Anticancer properties of tobacco were known to Western physicians -- I have an 1850 medical encyclopedia that lists a few. It is more efficient for depression than all SSRIs combined. Current research has determined that tobacco smoking is the single most efficient prevention of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS and a bunch of other neuromuscular disorders known to date. If it didn't compete with pharmaceutical drugs, it would never have been vilified the way it has been (with pharmaceutical companies launching the infinitely monied, the way they themselves are, "character assassination" campain that was so successful on all levels because it was so powerfully financed), and if it wasn't for chemical companies dumping two thousand toxic additives into everything smokable on the market, it would never have been harmful. The history of tobacco smoking by homo sapiens dates back at least 25,000 years, according to archeological findings, and there's researchers who think it is THE factor that has set us apart from other primates by rewiring our brain. The nicotine receptors in the brain are evolutionary proof that we have used it long enough to have incorporated it into who we are, and their close metabolic interactions with dopaminergic pathways seem to suggest that humans can't have a fully functional brain without it. I didn't make it all up, references available on request.

Sorry I don't know who Barry Long is, but I think he would probably have a hard time (if only linguistically) understanding one of my taiji teachers (not the main one) who always says, "remember ('re-member'), in taiji there's no arms!" A Wu stylist, this one. My main teacher, of Chen style, doesn't let me forget even the middle finger (which leads the whole body in Chen, and messes things up if forgotten). It is indeed wonderful to recall that we are physical. Re-call I would interpret as "call yourself back" after you have lost yourself. Re-ligion, from the Latin "religio" -- "I reconnect" -- used to serve the same purpose of unifying oneself with oneself. Not "tying and binding one to a deity of a particular denomination" but re-connecting the dis-membered parts of one's own consciousness. If interpreted this way, the part of one's consciousness that is angry has to be included -- or else no wholeness, no re-ligion, no re-membering, no re-calling... and no real self.

I think where and how one looks for it is not unlike this old joke about a midnight drunk crawling on his hands and knees in a pool of light under a lamppost. "What are you doing?" a passer-by asks. "Dammit... I dropped a twenty-dollar bill in that alley over there..." "But why are you looking for it here if you dropped it over there?" "You crazy?! Can't you see how dark it is over there? How can I look for it if where I can't see?!.." I happen to think Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, all those light-centered (i.e. yang/male-centered) belief systems can only take one to a very different place from where we have really "dropped" the truth... Gotta go to a dark place, to a yin place... "know the light but choose the dark"(Laozi)... and that's where taoism fits the bill. By the way, the non-discriminating approach also has a name. It is called New Age. It is different from traditional modalities in that its nonspecific belief system boils down to "whatever suits MY current purposes." Free style, so to speak. But not so free as to not have acquired a label of its own!

Well, taoism is huge, and not uniform... so some schools and sects have incorporated Buddhism (which has been historically missionary-promoted rather aggressively), while others have made a point of preserving the original tradition intact. An example of taoist sects that have incorporated quite a bit of Buddhism here and there are the Central Orthodox School, Celestial Teachers, and Complete Reality. An example of schools incompatible with it would be most sects of Way of Power Magical taoism, most sects of Divinational taoism (both celestial Tzu-weu Tu-su and land feng shui), and of course the original proto-taoist shamanic tradition and the beginning of it all with Fu Xi and his divine mathematical revelations that form the basis of scientific taoism... these can't possibly have anything in common with Buddhism.